In this episode of the Practice Profit System podcast, host Matthew Gillogly outlines a mindset framework he believes drives better relationships, health, and financial outcomes for entrepreneurs and owners of cash‑based medical practices. He begins by contrasting optimism and pessimism, citing research that pessimists experience poorer health, weaker relationships, and less financial success. Gillogly argues that true optimism is not blind positivity but a willingness to confront brutal facts while maintaining a hopeful outlook. He weaves this philosophy with his personal story of early success in pre‑foreclosure real‑estate investing, the crash of 2008, and the subsequent collapse of his coaching business, using the experience to illustrate how chaos can trigger irrational, panic‑driven decisions. He introduces the concept of “micro‑habits” as small, repeatable actions that compound into large life changes, and he offers a practical mental reset: recognize chaos, breathe, shift from pessimism to optimism, face the facts, and devise a concrete plan. Gillogly reinforces his points with references to mental‑performance experts like Trevor Moawad and a Navy SEAL commander’s advice on staying calm under life‑threatening pressure. Throughout, he promotes his book, The Anatomy of a 7‑Figure Medical Practice, and his marketing site, positioning the episode as a guide for listeners to achieve a healthier, more fulfilling, and financially successful 2022 and beyond.
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Welcome to the Practice Profit System podcast. Do you own a cash-based practice? Are you looking to start one? Tired of working endless hours and still not making enough money? Want to fire your insurance company? Then you're gonna love our podcast. Each episode is full of insights and proven strategies to grow your practice to 7 figures and more, allowing you to take more time off, make more money, and no longer have to take insurance reimbursements. Plus, get a free copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Medical Practice, where I detail my entire journey to creating my own 7-figure practice. Just go to www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. You just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, and you'll also get over $1,197 in free bonuses. That's www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Now, on to our show.
Hey everybody, Matt Gillogly with the Practice Profit System, and on this week's podcast, let's talk about how to have more fulfilling relationships, a healthier life, and to be more successful. That is going to be our topic today, so let's go ahead and dive right in. Now, if you listened to last week's podcast, and hopefully you did, we talked about the myth of New Year's resolutions, and I also shared with you why having New Year's resolutions is not always the best thing. Really what you want to do is you want to create new micro habits to create massive change in your life. I am going to talk to you a little bit about today one of the most important skill sets that you can learn to develop in order to have those more fulfilling relationships, a better life, a better marriage, make more money, all of those fun things. And it has to come down to variables. Now, these 2 variables You get to choose which one you want to have. You are not necessarily preordained and wired to be one specific way. And I'll explain the difference between those 2 in just a moment. But let me tell you a little bit of story before I get started and reveal these 2 traits, if you will. And I want to explain this story and take you all the way back to 2008. Now, I got started in my first business, first real business, aside from the car wash business and a few other things that I had as a kid growing up. But the first real business that I had was buying and selling pre-foreclosure real estate. And from that, and that started in 2004, 2003, 2004 is when I started buying real estate. And very quickly, I did very, very well. I wound up closing 3 deals in 90 days, made $90,000-plus. And the guy who mentored me asked me to start coaching people. That quickly grew into a multimillion-dollar coaching company. which is kind of the genesis of where I am today, and wound up coaching people all over the country on how to buy and sell real estate for a profit. And we did very, very well. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we were in the right place at the right time. And we were part of that whole meteoric rise of the run-up into real estate until 2008 hit. And I remember it vividly. It was in 2008 that crapola hit the fanola, as we like to say, and things got really, really bad, really, really fast. business went from going like this in October to almost nonexistent by the time we hit the end of the year. And it was brutal. And I was in a mastermind group at the time and writing a lot of copy. We weren't doing videos like this or podcasts like this, but we were writing a lot of daily emails and things like that out to the list. And I'm at my mastermind and I'm talking to this group of 15 other business owners in various different niches. We paid big money to be part of this group and I'm up there and I'm just lamenting how bad everything is. Now, mind you, 6 of the people in that room, 6 of the 15, were in some form of real estate, real estate agent, mortgage brokers, investor type stuff. One of the guys who was an investor who had a radio show in Philadelphia, his name was Jim Canale. Unfortunately, he's passed away since then. I'm going on and on, and he interrupted me with kind of a typical Philadelphia string of expletives. And basically what he said, and I'll clean it up for you, is he goes, Matt, I read your stuff and it's crap. It's all doom and gloom. You got to give people hope. Okay? Now, here's what I want you to get. There are 2 choices for you. You can be pessimistic or you can be optimistic. The reality is, is that people that are pessimistic have more sickness, less money, less fulfilling relationships, and they are less successful financially. It is a documented scientific fact. You can look it up. People that are pessimistic, I'm going to state that for you again, have less fulfilling relationships, are not as healthy, and they do not have as much financial success. People who are optimistic do have financial success, have healthier relationships, and have a healthier life.
Why?
Is it because of a positive mental mindset? Is it a positive mental attitude? No, because a lot of the optimists that I know confront things with brutal honesty. Hear that again. Most of the optimists that I know confront their situation with brutal honesty, which brings me to my second part of this. And that is chaos is irrational.
Okay?
If you have spent any time around me or if you've listened to my podcast for any amount of time, I have a basic philosophy in life, and that basic philosophy can be brought down to, what if it's all a blessing? What if everything that happens to me is a blessing? Or, and what I follow that up with is, this too shall pass.
Okay?
Another friend of mine goes, it all works out in the end. My Andrew reminds me, goes, Dad, it all works out in the end.
Okay?
This is the type of optimism that I'm talking about When it comes to being an entrepreneur, to owning your own practice, that you do not let chaos take over. Because when chaos takes over, people become irrational. And when you're irrational, you cannot make good, solid decisions. When you are in chaos, you focus on the chaos. You can't look for a way out. Okay? When the crap hit the fan for me, I was very upset because I gave and I gave and I was very generous, but a lot of those people disappeared. I'm not saying like I was buying people Rolexes, just I was very generous to charities and giving to people and things like that. And I was really upset because I was like, wait a second, I'm doing all these things, but yet where are all these people? Well, that's kind of the pessimistic side of it. When chaos happens, if I could speak to my younger self, if I could go back 12, 13 years, 14 years, and talk to my younger self in 2008, The biggest message I would have for that young Matthew Gillogly at the age of 40 would be, this too shall pass. This too shall pass. I spent a lot of time looking at everything that was going wrong, spending the day waiting for things to go wrong, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And guess what? The other shoe dropped.
Okay?
Trevor Moawad, who works with the University of Alabama, recently just passed away, on developing the mental side of their team. Said, I promise you, positive thinking may not work every single time, but negative thinking works 100% of the time.
Okay?
You have to be very optimistic, but you have to confront the brutal facts. It is vitally important because when you confront the brutal facts, you get out of chaos. Now, most people, when they want to confront the brutal facts, they're going to be like, oh my God, my hair's on fire. The world's going to be coming to an end. I'm going to be broke living underneath a— living in a van down by the river. That's not really going to happen, folks. What's really going to happen is when you do that, you heighten your blood pressure, you heighten your pulse rate, you release chemicals in your body that prevent you from being able to look at things objectively. And what happens is that you start to make bad decision after bad decision and things go haywire. When things start to get rough, when things start to get difficult, You can't look back and say, I should have made this decision. All you can do is look at where you are right then and there and make decisions to get things stabilized and to start moving forward and have a very optimistic outlook. I'll leave you with this. Navy SEAL commander was training people, and he said— he was training non-Navy SEALs. He was just training out in the community, and he was sharing some thoughts on how to survive an attack. And he said, if somebody comes into your house and they attack you and they stab you with a knife in your stomach, you're probably going to have about 90 minutes to live. He said, most people go into panic mode. When in that mode, what you're supposed to do is, well, that's already happened. Okay? There's nothing I can do about that. How do I disarm this guy or neutralize this guy or gal? So that I can get to the hospital.
Okay?
Now that's a very different way of thinking because I think most people, me included, by the way, if somebody were to stab me, I'd be like, oh my God, what the hell's going on? And then you can feel the blood coming out of you, right? You've got to stabilize your brain to stabilize the situation.
Okay?
Optimistic, there's gotta be a way for me to get out of this. There's gotta be something good that's gonna be coming out of this. All right? So stack this philosophy on the concept of creating these new micro habits. When you find yourself and things aren't going well and you start finding yourself being pessimistic, like, oh my God, it's happening again, this is what's happened in the past, or I knew this was going to happen, slow down, take a deep breath, get out of chaos, get to optimism, get out of chaos, get out of pessimism, get into optimism, confront the brutal facts, get yourself a plan to get back to square one so that you can then move forward and prevent that from happening again in the future. Hope you enjoyed this. If you haven't had a chance to look into last— listen to last week's about why New Year's resolutions are a complete and utter waste of time, listen to that. Listen to this one. Let's get you on the right path to having a great 2022 and beyond. If I can help in any way, you can go to srpmedicalmarketing.com and check us out and listen to as many of these podcasts as possible. I'm Matthew Gillogly. Thank you so much for joining me. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next week. Bye everybody.
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals, or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next week.
